I might be interested in that, though I have an irrational aversion to leaving my computer turned on overnight .

I guess the best thing to do is to take a system that's borderline unstable, save the initial setup as a gsim file and then run it at various timesteps?

I've got a load of systems we could use for this. (though usefully I just changed the code of my system generator to ditch the GGs that make it unstable, but I still have an old version of the code that generates the full system)

I think here is where it could be useful to have the ability to just move one or more planets around on their orbits manually. Instead of the current "edit object" window, i think it would be a lot better to have the "Create Object" window show up with the current values of positions, eccentricity etc already filled in. Then those can be directly edited and the simulation continue with the new parameters.

That way we can move a planet around in its orbit at the start of the simulation (relative to where it was in the original save file) and see if that changes things too - the current edit object window is too inconvenient to be able to do this easily.

EDIT: And woo! With this post I just became the poster who'd made the most posts on the forum apart from Tony and abyssoft!

I've been following this discussion since a couple of days and am also running the 5-sim . It seems to me also that the time step is very important . A system ( also other systems) gets easily "exited" if the time step is too much . It seems to me that one possibilty to examin the time step is to calculate te total energy of the system . As during intgration the kinetic energy moves into gravitational energy and vice versa , and while the total energy should be conserved if the calculation is well done , it may be a good idea to calcuate the total energy of the whole system . If this energy "moves" away it may indicate that the time step is too much . Perhaps some work to do for Tony ?

Thanks for the consideration tony . I think it might help , but there's perhaps some programming work involved .... I run here at home a simple Excel sheet for a 2 body system in which one can clearly see the influence of time -step ...